type: timeline_event
On March 3, 2026, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced the opening of criminal investigations into Gregory Bovino, former Customs and Border Protection chief patrol agent and Border Patrol commander-at-large, and multiple ICE agents for alleged unlawful conduct during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Moriarty's office launched the Transparency and Accountability Project (TAP), a structured investigation gathering community evidence of 17 distinct incidents involving alleged unlawful behavior by federal agents during the operation.
Operation Metro Surge was a large-scale immigration enforcement operation launched in December 2025 under Bovino's command in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. The operation became nationally controversial in January 2026 when federal agents killed two individuals, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, during enforcement actions — deaths that sparked protests and calls for accountability. Investigators are examining Bovino's January 21, 2026 deployment of a chemical agent into a crowd of protesters near Mueller Park as a potential criminal offense.
Bovino had previously been the subject of judicial criticism: in a federal court case arising from the Chicago immigration operations that preceded Operation Metro Surge, Judge Sara Ellis singled out Bovino in a 233-page ruling, finding that agents under his command "falsely depicted ordinary Chicagoans as professional agitators." During deposition, the judge described Bovino as "evasive," either providing "cute responses" or "outright lying."
Following the killings of Pretti and Good and the resulting public backlash, the Trump administration removed Bovino from his command of the Minneapolis operation and reassigned him to his previous position as chief patrol agent in El Centro, California — a reassignment critics characterized as a lateral transfer protecting a favored official from accountability rather than discipline. White House border czar Tom Homan assumed personal oversight of the operation's final phase.
The Minnesota criminal investigation marks the first state-level attempt to hold federal immigration enforcement officers criminally accountable for conduct during the Trump administration's mass enforcement operations — a constitutional confrontation over whether state law applies to federal officers conducting immigration enforcement on state soil.